Rise of Far-Right Party in Denmark Reflects Europe’s Unease

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Supporters of the Alternative, a newly elected green party, celebrated on Thursday in Copenhagen. Political parties expressing anger and anxiety are gaining traction in the European Union.CreditCreditMathias Svold/POLFOTO, via Associated Press

LONDON — The surprisingly strong showing in elections on Thursday of Denmark’s anti-immigration, anti-Brussels Danish People’s Party has underlined a growing crisis of confidence in traditional political institutions and in the European Union itself.

European officials have seemed incapable of framing a credible alternative narrative to that of their critics in the face of rising immigration and slow economic growth, and parties expressing popular anger and anxiety are gaining traction, pushing politics rightward in some of Europe’s wealthiest and most stable countries, like the Nordic nations, Britain and France.

At the same time, the inability of the European Union and the eurozone to negotiate a compromise with Greece over that nation’s financial problems — to the point where a Greek exit from the euro and even from the bloc itself cannot be ruled out — has further undercut confidence in traditional political leadership and in the direction of European politics.

“We are in a new place, and people are right to be worried about the political direction,” said Simon Tilford, deputy director of the Center for European Reform, a London-based research institution. “The eurozone crisis, combined with outside trends like migration and globalization, has exposed the disconnect between domestic politics in many countries and E.U. politics.”

The effort of traditional political parties to attract alienated and angry voters has shifted the discourse. “Once society legitimizes talking of immigration and immigrants in a way now routinely discussed, there is a greater risk of policy becoming more extreme,” Mr. Tilford said.

In Denmark, the center-left coalition lost to a center-right coalition, but the main surprise was the Danish People’s Party, which ran second with 21 percent of the vote and beat the center-right Liberals four years after finishing third with 12 percent of the vote. The Liberals are likely to form a coalition government in any case, but the People’s Party platform, appealing to anti-foreigner, anti-Islamic and nationalist sentiment while promising incentives to older people, suggested fundamental shifts in public opinion.

The same formula has been used by France’s National Front, which is running strongly in opinion polls, as well as by similar parties in Finland, Sweden and Britain, where the U.K. Independence Party won only one seat in May’s election but got nearly 13 percent of the vote.

Greece is led by the far-left Syriza party, which won on a promise to end the austerity imposed by Brussels and to get a reduction in Greece’s huge and probably unpayable mound of debt. Syriza, like many of the right-wing populist parties, appeals to voters unhappy with “dictates” from the European Union’s headquarters in Brussels that trump national politics.

“Syriza and the Danish People’s Party are mirror images of one another, part of the same megatrend now in many European countries,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “There is a remaking of the political order, with centrist parties that have run politics over the last few decades being hollowed out and replaced by parties appealing to the fringes.”

To Mr. Leonard, the shift appears structural, similar to the way that liberal parties were weakened a century ago and then surpassed by socialist parties, like the Labour Party in Britain.

“Globalization produces winners and losers, and large groups feel they’ve been left behind, no longer represented by mainstream parties,” Mr. Leonard said. “The parties of the left have become representatives of public-sector workers and the creative industries, while the right represents big business and finance, and both are rather liberal in social values. That leaves large segments of the population feeling angry and unrepresented, and new parties are emerging with a different language.”

For Daniela Schwarzer, the director of the German Marshall Fund’s Berlin office, the failures to deal with Greece have exacerbated polarization in other member states.

“The parties gain ground who want to unravel the system, and the moderate parties never understood that you can be critical of the E.U. and still pro-European — they’ve missed that window,” she said. “Now a huge gap has been left open, without a positive narrative about the future and without the necessary review and criticism of the functioning of the system.”

The danger is the accumulation of these political events “in a trend with common roots, which is a loss of trust in government by increasing numbers of European voters,” said Robin Niblett, the director of Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

“If Greece does crash,” he said, “it will only confirm some of the negatives of the European Union for the ongoing debate about Britain’s membership.”

“National angsts and economic crises,” Mr. Niblett said, “feed off one another in unpredictable ways.”

If there is a sense in northern Europe that the European Union is failing to control immigration in a period of weak growth, in southern Europe there is a sense that Brussels is imposing painful, if not impossible, demands on nations that will never fit the dominant German economic model.

The rise of these populist parties is perhaps most pronounced in northern countries that allocate parliamentary seats in proportion to popular vote, a system that tends to create coalition governments with narrow majorities, said Timo Lochocki, a Europe expert at the German Marshall Fund in Berlin.

Countries like Denmark, Finland and the Netherlands are tough on Greece, he said, because governing coalitions “are very afraid to lose even 2 or 3 percent of the vote to far-right parties if they give in to Greek demands.”